When Henry David Thoreau observed ants on his solitary excursion into nature, he made a very astute observation: “We live meanly, like ants.... Our lives are frittered away by detail” (Thoreau 26). When I really think about it, all we as humans and high school students do is worry about details that do not matter in the big picture of things. For example, we worry how the rest of our friends see us, how popular we are, or a picture we posted on facebook. When thousands of people die every minute from starvation and disease, we can see how insignificant our trivial problems are.
Because he feels like many people of his time want to act and talk and walk like everyone else, Thoreau also declared that “If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
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Likewise, we sat outside our English classroom for half an hour to observe nature in silence and solitude. The results were a lot different that I thought they would be. I envisioned it being twenty-five minutes of boredom staring into space, trying not to fall asleep. To the contrary, it was a lot more revolutionary than that. That might sound a little cheesy, but I really mean that I would never have done that by myself in a million years. Despite the magnitude of the whole day in comparison to the twenty-five minutes we spent outside, humans in today’s society rarely take the time to relax and observe their surroundings for five minutes, let alone five times that amount of time. We forget how life went on before the time of gadgets and videos and instant communication. That’s why we learned about transcendentalism. Because even back before technology, people would get distracted easily, and Thoreau and Emerson needed to show them a better way to live their